Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

"As a mission-driven company and Certified B Corp, Badger is dedicated to creating a healthier world by embracing changes that foster true justice, equality, diversity, and inclusion for all people. We recognize that to create a better future for all people and our planet, we must cultivate thoughtful, long-lasting change for a fairer workplace, community, and world. As such, our Board of Directors and Leadership Team are committed to implementing a strategic plan with specific, measurable goals to manifest our vision of a truly diverse, equitable and inclusive Badger community." - WS Badger Company Board Statement

In 2020, Badger decided to add diversity, equity, and inclusion to our company mission. This process began with our leadership team committing to studying and discussing ways to support meaningful change and action when appropriate during weekly meetings. A Social Justice Peer Group was formed at the employee level to help drive education and support for DEI development across the organization. In 2021, we began working with our consultants, Strength Perspective LLC, to help develop a more equitable future in every area of our business through a visioning and strategic planning process. A DEI committee comprised of individuals from our company, including representatives from our Leadership Team and our broader community, was established to work with the consultants on this process.

This work is a journey, an ongoing process of learning, growing, and doing better. This is a living set of actions, and we will continue to ask, “what’s next?” as we navigate the changes needed at Badger and in our greater community. As we engage in this work, we are sure we will find many more ways to make change, identifying the ways we need to actively grow and expand our work to ensure that our mission is inclusive of everyone.

Our mission has always been to create products of the highest natural quality, based on simplicity and thoughtful preparation, with the intention to protect, soothe and heal. We are committed to ensuring that our mission of healing extends to all; that our products are helpful and accessible for everyone, and that our sourcing fuels fairness and equity.

We realize that finding a safe mineral sunscreen is still a frustrating and challenging task for people of color, due to many of these sunscreens leaving a white cast on melanin-rich skin. That’s why we are excited to share that we’re currently testing our entire line of clear zinc sunscreens for transparency on a far wider variety of skin tones. This testing will inform our future sunscreen formulations, helping us understand how much we need to adjust our current offerings.

We are working from the inside out to cultivate a welcoming marketing presence that ensures folks of all bodies, ethnicities, and genders are represented and valued through our messaging, photography, and social media engagement.

Our vision for a healthier world finds expression through the way we work and through the way we treat each other and the people we serve. Inside and outside our walls, we recognize our responsibility to ensure all people feel welcomed and supported.

We are fostering continued learning and engagement through discussion groups at work; opportunities for activism published in the company-wide newsletter; and training on diversity, equity & inclusion for our owners and strategic leadership team. We are working with a consultant, Strength Perspective LLC, to help account for our own limitations and blind spots.

Beyond non-discrimination in employment, we are committed to fostering diversity in our workplace. We are taking steps toward incorporating best practices for attracting more diverse applicants, including the use of diversity-specific job boards, and including bias disrupter steps in our hiring procedure.

While we are all on this journey together, it must begin with each of us as individuals. We are providing opportunities for guided book discussions, podcast listen groups, and other opportunities for learning within our company.

As we envision a healthier future for people and planet, we acknowledge that fighting for positive change means understanding the interconnectedness of multiple socioeconomic inequities. Climate policy must account for the disproportionate impact of climate change on communities of color, and true family-friendly business practices must address the unique challenges Black parents, particularly mothers, face in the workplace.

Our past work includes a range of practices and policies that support
women in leadership, fair and equitable pay, flexible working hours, and paid family and medical leave. Along with voicing our support for family-friendly business practices and climate justice, we will support policies furthering racial justice and equity.

Badger has always been supportive of our local community through our charitable giving and volunteer policies, and we are committed to expanding this work further to strengthen our own community and beyond.

We have updated our Charitable Giving mission and planned annual
donations to be more inclusive of social justice causes.

We have updated our volunteer policy, which provides employees 40 hours of paid volunteer time each year, to include activism in support of social justice issues.

We will share our work and commitments with our community of other business leaders to become more accountable together.

Staff Recommendations

Title: Caste: The Origins of Our
Discontents
Recommended by: Badger Cara

“Caste really reframes the conversation around social justice and racial equity, bringing in elements of human emotion, unconscious bias, contemporary politics, global and national history, group dynamics and more – you name it, and Isabel Wilkerson thought of it. In this book, she manages to strike a balance between emotionally compelling and intellectually rigorous prose – one that makes her writing not only informative but profoundly impactful. Reading this book brought so many thought-provoking
conversations to our Social Justice Working Group book discussions, and seems to have left everyone who participated forever altered in some way.”